For my part I think they need to further segregate random group play from organized group play. Random groups should be like scenarios, DPS-only content. Zero need for tanks and heals. Sure, they can queue for it, but they get no faster queue than anyone else. Have 3-man Group Scenarios, 5-Man Dungeon Scenarios and 25-Man Raid Scenarios. Let the pre-form content be Heroic Scenarios, Heroic Dungeons(which can actually be tough and need organized CC/etc again)and then Flex Mode Raiding, stepping up to Challenge Modes and Normal/HC Raiding from there.

No more absurd queue times to play a game, and tanks and heals can go back to being sought out and feeling as special and shiny as they want to. AFAIC that's a win-win for everyone.

Exactly this. Most people can get that "carrot on a stick" thrill with most any other multiplayer game now. Without the monthly fee. Without having to deal with people. Without having to deal with a lot of the baggage of MMOs (Forced grouping to "see" things, being judged by others and letting them decide if you're allowed to touch parts of the game or not, and so forth. I think people really, really underestimate exactly what's going on.)

To be frank I get that carrot on a stick far more often in Marvel Heroes and it's UTTERLY totally f2p. I mean you can get everything in it just playing and they have so many good systems to offset ridiculous rng it's not even funny.

Now my punisher doesn't need gear for any activity at his level, it's largely more about getting lvls now. However I still chase cosmic items and purples and blues and whatever comes my way.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

That's fucking RICH I gotta say. I mean you've said before that the argument the game is old is incredible weak but talent trees and pandas are even weaker. The talent treest (and we know this from developer tweets) are largely irrelevant at lower lvls of play. People simple pick whatever and stick with it they don't optimize or play around at all until much higher levels of gameplay.

Honestly I don't think you should ever feel like you should HAVE to "optimize" your character instead of doing what you WANT. This is a fundamental problem with the design of the typical MMO.

Irrelevant. I didn't need the gear to kill mephisto or baal in d2 but I still wanted the chase. I could also ask why you think you need the gear? Or why you think gear should have bearing or relevance in end game raiding at all? Wouldn't it be far better to simple have end game raids at higher lvls scale like challenge modes? I was always told skill was the most important thing and gear was largely irellevant. Come to find this apparently isn't the case and everyone needs the gear now..

But what chase is there if it's easy dungeons repeated ad nauseum? I'd get it if you enjoyed it because it was difficult, or if there was some epic journey, but I don't really consider "repeating these 3 easy dungeons over and over" a chase.

And the Gear vs. Skill debate is another thing entirely, but you could argue gear is necessary for character progression.

Irrelevant. I didn't need the gear to kill mephisto or baal in d2 but I still wanted the chase. For some folks it's just about the skinner box, for some people it's just about character progression without the "end" of raiding.

I could also ask why you think you need the gear? Or why you think gear should have bearing or relevance in end game raiding at all? Wouldn't it be far better to simple have end game raids at higher lvls scale like challenge modes? I was always told skill was the most important thing and gear was largely irellevant. Come to find this apparently isn't the case and everyone needs the gear now..

Not everyone is enamored by the prospect of killing the same mobs over and over again for absolutely no discernible reason than to prove that you can kill it.

RPGs have always been about ADVANCING your character; the way in which people do that in WoW is largely through gear, as that's what's been required to see content. People were perhaps more content to do dailies and grind the same dungeons for no particular reason back in Burning Crusade because they 1) had never seen anything better, and 2) and most importantly, hadn't been doing it for 8 years at that point.

Now, sure, there are some other things that you can do in WoW that eat up time, but ALL of them have definite ends... you CAN do every quest in the game, you CAN level one of every class, you CAN collect every mount available, or every pet, etc... you could even get every achievement. But you can NEVER beat "the gearing train." Gear is released in the highest volume every raid patch, whereas, in a good patch, perhaps four mounts are released.

Last edited by Kaleredar; 2013-10-31 at 08:06 AM.

“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow

There is a large group of people on this site for whom "casual" seems to be a dirty word.

So let's spell it out in realistic terms. Casuals make up the VAST majority of people who play this game. Each of them spends $15 a month on a subscription. Without realistic things to do after leveling, casual players will get bored and leave. Blizzard will lose a significant portion of its revenue. And WoW will die.

If you don't believe me, take an economics course. This game will only supply when there is a demand.

So, those of you who hate LFR and want it to go away, and think casual players are something to be scorned, you really need to start living in the real world. You need LFR and other things for casual players to do. Casual players pay the bills, and pay FAR more of them than you hardcore folks do.

and on top of that, people REALLY need to understand that the game had massive subscriber churn in the beginning, up until the peak of WOTLK. It doesn't have that anymore, and the raids being this or that in those old expansions doesn't mean jack --- If it did, people would of been doing them then. They weren't. Hell, people barely ever did dungeons as much as people think, till LFD got in there. For most people in BC, for example, their endgame was random BGs :x That's why the game had such insane turn around. The leveling game and the endgame are in stark contrast to one another in how they're presented. Moreso now, even, as it seems like they entire leveling game is utterly pointless and made to just shovel you into the end as soon as possible. When you design nearly your entire game around it's end, you have to expect to offer SOME people an easy way to enjoy it, considering your market. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing?

You talk about Cata as if it was casual-friendly and the peak of the WoW subscriber numbers. News flash, it wasn't.

Cata was the start of making things non-casual. Heroic 5mans? Difficult, at least until End Time dungeons were released. Raids? Difficult. Back in Wrath, 10man raids were easier. In Cata? Nope, they made 10mans on par with 25mans, raising the difficulty and getting rid of casual-friendly raiding.

Well, suffice to say several people didn't actually do much in normal mode raids right off the bat; as I said, they resolved to complain that they needed these barely-an-upgrade epics from reps in order to do the raids.

At any rate, if you introduce swift catch-up mechanics, then you're just going to run into that always present crowd of "THEY'RE ROLLING OVER MY RAIDING ACCOMPLISHMENTS BY DOING SOME SHITTY DUNGEONS! AFDSJFLSDKJFLSD:KJF!" tryhard raiders.

Dunno if those complaints really existed when Timeless Isle came out (they may have and I just missed them). If they get the iLvl numbers right, though, getting you gear that gets you high enough to join the latest LFR wouldn't be a problem for me.

But what chase is there if it's easy dungeons repeated ad nauseum? I'd get it if you enjoyed it because it was difficult, or if there was some epic journey, but I don't really consider "repeating these 3 easy dungeons over and over" a chase.

And the Gear vs. Skill debate is another thing entirely, but you could argue gear is necessary for character progression.

You should ask folks why they kept farming bosses in d3 or d2 that they basically crushed without any effort at all. Or why people did that so readily in wotlk with no issues.

If you make the argument that gear is necessary for character progression then I would ask do you think character progression is the fundamental appeal of this game? If so then you just answered your question about repeating easy crap. Unless you want to live in a world where raiding is forced on everybody (which it more or less is now) people are going to still want to feel like their guy is getting stronger while they do activities they LIKE not what they have to.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

I did, and I disagreed with the part where he said Cata endgame was casual-friendly and said that the game becoming casual-unfriendly was the cause of subscriber loss. I didn't disagree with the whole post, just with the part about Cata.

Not everyone is enamored by the prospect of killing the same mobs over and over again for absolutely no discernible reason than to prove that you can kill it.

RPGs have always been about ADVANCING your character; the way in which people do that in WoW is largely through gear, as that's what's been required to see content. People were perhaps more content to do dailies and grind the same dungeons for no particular reason back in Burning Crusade because they 1) had never seen anything better, and 2) and most importantly, hadn't been doing it for 8 years at that point.

Advancing your character in rpgs was largely done by lvling. It was mostly a process that was entirely deterministic and frankly almost always fucking simple as shit. Gear in warcraft is A) Not deterministic at all and B) In some ways a far more complex thing then in most rpgs I've played. WoW is actually a very poor RPG. It's mostly because it has that little MMO part at the front but yea it's kinda lame as an rpg. Honestly it wasn't until demon souls that I felt an rpg challenged me in anyway. The appeal of ff6 or mass effect 1 or da:O was not in it's difficulty or challenge.

I agree the doing it for 8 years thing is getting old but come on wtf is raiding then? I mean raiding is not only not casual friendly it's the same fucking shit they've been producing for 8 years now and now it seems that it's all they want to produce...

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by smartazjb0y

I did, and I disagreed with the part where he said Cata endgame was casual-friendly and said that the game becoming casual-unfriendly was the cause of subscriber loss. I didn't disagree with the whole post, just with the part about Cata.

I do agree that cata was less casual friendly then say wotlk but I mean mists is less casual friendly then both of them. *shrug* I would welcome cata back I could do the hard dungeons man. I'm realistic enough to understand that not everybody was cut out for it and that's fine because I'm also good with easy rewarding dungeons as well. When I wasn't casual playing this game in wotlk I liked playing alts and guess what I did alot of in wotlk and you know what that's AWESOME. It breaks up the gameplay quite a bit and keeps it some what fresh.

Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2013-10-31 at 08:11 AM.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

You won't get good answers, because anyone saying that LFR should be removed simply hasn't thought the issue all the way through, or hasn't been playing long enough to realize that when the game DID have more dungeons, folks got utterly sick of running them, and you had just as many complaints flying around. (just about different topics).

While the game should certainly have more dungeons, and hopefully good ones next time around, LFR isn't, and shouldn't, be going anywhere.

I think we should all just quote this and read it until it sinks in!

LFR is fine (needs some improvements but what game mode doesn't!) Add in more dungeons, make better rewards in challenge modes AND make dungeons have some dungeon set gear and make justice points more useful for upgrading dungeon gear. add in a dungeon or 2 each raid patch.

You should ask folks why they kept farming bosses in d3 or d2 that they basically crushed without any effort at all.

You know how... insignificant... the number of people that did that are?

Or why people did that so readily in wotlk with no issues.

I sure as hell don't remember doing that.

If you make the argument that gear is necessary for character progression then I would ask do you think character progression is the fundamental appeal of this game?

Because it's an RPG.

And that's almost entirely inconsequential anyway; who are you to say "you shouldn't like this aspect of the game, here, go be happy with this other completely unrelated aspect."

“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow

You should ask folks why they kept farming bosses in d3 or d2 that they basically crushed without any effort at all. Or why people did that so readily in wotlk with no issues.

If you make the argument that gear is necessary for character progression then I would ask do you think character progression is the fundamental appeal of this game? If so then you just answered your question about repeating easy crap. Unless you want to live in a world where raiding is forced on everybody (which it more or less is now) people are going to still want to feel like their guy is getting stronger while they do activities they LIKE not what they have to.

I dunno about "no effort at all," since if they did those bosses on the hardest difficulty, at some point those bosses were hard. And they fought to overcome them, then started farming.

I never said it's a fundamental appeal, but I think it's important. For me, progression isn't just numbers or iLvl, it's the content I get access to and the content I can do. If I'm not going to use raid-equivalent gear for anything, I don't really see the need for it

I dunno about "no effort at all," since if they did those bosses on the hardest difficulty, at some point those bosses were hard. And they fought to overcome them, then started farming.

I never said it's a fundamental appeal, but I think it's important. For me, progression isn't just numbers or iLvl, it's the content I get access to and the content I can do. If I'm not going to use raid-equivalent gear for anything, I don't really see the need for it

People doing LFR would most likely use the LFR gear to improve their characters power and thus make the content they do easier. I actually enjoy seeing a new item drop for me that I can put on and make my character more powerful. In fact I always enjoyed that aspect of the game even when I was doing heroic raiding.

You know how... insignificant... the number of people that did that are?

I sure as hell don't remember doing that.

Because it's an RPG.

And that's almost entirely inconsequential anyway; who are you to say "you shouldn't like this aspect of the game, here, go be happy with this other completely unrelated aspect."

You're really gonna have me defend diablo now. I mean 14 million people bought it. I knew lots of people (on and off mind you) who kept going back to kill easy bosses for lvls and for loot in d2. The game was seriously undertuned and that was it's greatest strength. EVERYONE could get gear and everyone could play with everyone else. Very little segregation of the community unlike warcraft which is all about that unforuntately. The appeal was of course character advancement but not because of difficulty.

You sure as hell don't remember doing that on wotlk. I maybe did it on 4 or 5 alts. Hunter, mage, paladin, druid, shaman. It was great. I fucking loved it.

Then I would submit to you wow is a very poor rpg.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.